You Shook Me All Night Long, or At Least for a Couple of Hours

Massive Attack, 18/4/03, Brixton Academy, London

Readers, let me tell you, the dance floor at Brixton slopes down towards the stage. It's great because all the tiny little women in the audience had a much better chance of seeing the stage, and I bet it made the job of cleaning up just that much easier -- throughout the show, sticky, crushed plastic beer cups kept slipping under my feet as gravity pulled them inexorably downwards towards what must have been a sea of sticky crushed plastic beer cups at the foot of the stage -- and I bet the janitorial staff could pretty much ignore the rest of the floor after the show. The ambience at Brixton was further enhanced by two dozen cute girls in lime green vests collecting change for the the Red Cross Disaster Fund. I made the obvious joke, that I was against disaster, and someone had the good grace to chuckle.

We stood on the slanted floor, and the inevitable aisle of open space formed behind me anyway (Readers, I'm six-foot-five). The bass hit hard. The bass player was an enormous black man, remniscent from our vantage of the magic giant well-intentioned felon in The Green Mile. He could have killed us had he played any slap bass or hit a note hard, but he understood the power humming at his fingertips and stuck to gentle picking. The gentle picking still made the whole place shake and forced my heart to beat in time.

They trotted out a whole array of singers. The worst one seemed to be the main one, a little dude in black with hair gelled into a mohawk who moaned into a distortion box. The best was a tall, muscular man with dreads, also all in black, who sang reggae grooves. The sexiest was a blonde woman, and she was sexiest in silhouette. She was swaying to the beat, she had sparkly tassles hanging off the arms of her shirt, and the music was powerful and it was great to watch her move in the white light and the blue light. She wasn't naked, not close, and there was nothing overt, but it was exciting to see her up there with all of this force radiating out from behind her. The music didn't have enough pace, and it lacked the groove of the Beasties and the soar of Radiohead or Moby at his best, before we all heard those songs too many times, but it had enough groove and enough soar to make sure that all that power kept you up and didn't overwhelm you. A few of the baselines sped up and made it impossible not to dance, and they should have explored those more.

The huge screen behind the band made the show. It was a scoreboard, though the pixels were smaller and had more colors than "on" and "off". It showed data -- the date and time, ones and zeroes, letters and numbers, and growing in complexity as the show went on to news tickers, NAV updates, airline schedules, and real-time worldwide statistics on consumption, death, and the movement of the earth. Every piece of data would show up, flesh out, and then get consumed by static. The best was a point in the third song where scrolling streams of ones and zeroes coalesced into a flower blooming, and the ones and zeroes themselves coalesced into larger A's, C's, T's, and G's. The nucleotides made up the shape and outline of the blossom, and pulsed and seethed and scrolled along it even as it wilted into a man running and the bass pounded and the synthesizer synthesized and we danced.